“She says you bought her lunch. She says she wants help for Mrs. Sloan. And she has the old dame’s pocketbook, with eleven hundred dollars in it.”
Alice Groves looked at a curved needle, threaded with a suture, which she held in her hand. She listened to the soughing of the fire wind and watched the jitterbug reflection on the painted wall, felt tremor in the floors and listened intently to the groan that came up from the hot streets. Somehow she ran her mind backward to the cities that were gone, the streets, the skyscrapers, the White Elephant Restaurant. “Oh,” she said slowly. ‘Where is she?”
Nora was brought. Her hair was burned ragged, her eyebrows were gone, her face, on one side, was red and peeling. Her mittens were two big holes through which her fingers showed, raw—from the broken masonry everywhere. Her shoes were slit and her feet bled. Nobody could have recognized her under the dirt; she was hardly identifiable as a child, or even as a person.
But her voice was about the same. “Hello, Miss Groves. I left Mrs. Sloan in a big car up the street a few blocks. But it took so long to get here!”
Alice Groves thought of all the people between that “car” and the Infirmary. ‘What’s wrong with her?”
“Her legs got mashed and she’s unconscious.”
“Is her body mashed?”
“Oh, no. She’s all right. Her heart’s going good. We listened to it.”
“We?”
“Jeff, that’s her butler. He ran—toward the end. Willis, that’s the chauffeur. He had a stroke or something.”